THE MEN WHO FORECAST THE WAR

THE TUSKEGEE WEATHERMEN AND THE COST OF KNOWING

By: William Ferrier Jr.

Narrated by: Virtual Voice

Two men. Two forecasts. Four hundred deaths.

In the summer of 1944, a Black meteorologist from New Orleans and a Japanese American physicist from San Francisco have never met—but their work is about to collide in a disaster that will haunt them both for forty years.

Samuel Delacroix earned his way into the Army's weather program despite every barrier Jim Crow could build. Now stationed in England, he's forecasting missions for the same military that won't let him eat in its mess halls. His predictions help keep bombers in the air and pilots alive. Until the day they don't.

Kenji Yamamoto was studying physics at Berkeley when Executive Order 9066 sent his family to the concentration camps at Heart Mountain. Now he works in a classified facility in Colorado, developing weather models for the Pacific Theater—models that will be misapplied to a European mission with catastrophic results.

When a forecast failure sends forty-three bombers down over Germany, both men must reckon with the weight of their invisible contributions to a war that treats them as second-class citizens. What follows is an extraordinary forty-year correspondence—a friendship forged in guilt, sustained by letters, and finally consummated when two old men meet at Normandy to stand before the graves of the men they couldn't save.

A novel about the science of prediction and the impossibility of knowing. About racism and internment, service and sacrifice, and the particular burden of doing essential work that history will never record.

Perfect for readers of All the Light We Cannot See, The Nightingale, and Hotel & the Corner of Bitter and Sweet.

Great Story

This a must listen even with virtual voice. The first time I much better understood, what it meant to have a reliable weather forecast in WW2